Agri.q: A Sustainable Rover for Precision Agriculture

In this paper, an innovative mobile and sustainable robot for precision agriculture, named “Agri.q”, is presented. Characterized by a peculiar mechanical architecture and provided with specific sensors and tools, the Agri.q is able to operate in unstructured agricultural environments in order to fulfill several tasks as mapping, monitoring, and manipulating or collecting small soil and leaf samples. In addition, the rover is equipped with a top platform covered with solar panels, whose orientation can be exploited both to maximize the sunrays collection during the auto-charging phase and to permit a drone landing over a horizontal surface, regardless of the ground inclination. A particular attention to energy consumptions and sustainability has driven the mechanical design of the Agri.q powertrain: the weight reduction results into a limited number of small size locomotion motors, enhancing the importance of the harvested solar energy on the energy balance of the whole system. In this paper, all these characteristics are described and analyzed in detail. Moreover, some preliminary tests aimed at evaluating the energetic behaviour of the rover under different working and weather conditions are presented.